VORTEX — A WHIRL OF 3D GAMES...

COSTA PANAYI is a name you tend to remember, and in Spectrum
circles it is a name firmly associated with 3D games. Games such as
TLL, Cyclone, Android II, Highway Encounter
and of course, this month’s Smash — Revolution.

Costa is the main man when it comes to programming at VORTEX, the
Manchester-based software house, while LUKE ANDREWS takes care of the business
affairs. Costa and Luke came to Ludlow with one of the first copies of
Revolution for us to review, and while they were here Graeme Kidd seized
the opportunity to talk to the duo with a persistent reputation for producing
quality games.

Like quite a few software houses, VORTEX began life as a hobby.
Costa Panayi first got interested in computing back in the ZX81 days at the end
of 1982. He was working as a mechanical engineer and bought one of Sir
Clive’s home computers, played around with it and swapped programs with
ZX81 owning friends. Then he got together with a few friends, they decided they
could write programs and gradually the hobby started to pay for itself:

“Our first games were Pontoon and
Othello — small BASIC games — and we sent them off to a
publishers and started earning royalties! Once we’d written and sold
those games we bought books on machine code and started learning. Then the
Spectrum came out and we wrote Cosmos and Android I.

“Soon, we realised that writing programs was okay as a
hobby, but when we tried to run a business on the side it was taking up too
much time. We knew Luke, who was a teacher at the time, and he was interested
in the business side of things...”

Luke takes over the story: “I got involved on the
business side to allow the lads to program — everything was still being
done on a part-time or hobby basis and with the talents that everyone had,
everyone fitted in quite nicely so we just progressed. Everyone who’s
been associated with us has really helped and encouraged us — people have
seen that we’ve worked hard and that we’ve got the product, and
everyone’s pushed and said ‘well done’ which is great.
Sometimes, a lot of people just say ‘oh don’t bother’ or
whatever, which is a bit demoralising, but we never had to face that.”

Gradually, what was a fairly lucrative (and time consuming) hobby grew to
the point where it was a backroom industry and then, during 1983, the team got
together, decided on a plan and began to run Vortex professionally. It was
clear the company was successful enough to warrant people giving up their
‘day jobs’: “Yes, we bought premises,
employed people and so on. In some ways we’re cautious on the business
side, as we are on the programming side, in the sense that Cos has always come
out with excellent stuff, and we are more geared to quality than
quantity,” Luke explains. “Naturally, we
all had a few regrets when we first started out writing and selling programs
full-time — you’ve got a secure job and are doing well in it and it
comes to the point where a part-time job suddenly has to at least equal what
you were doing before, then decisions become a bit difficult. We got to the
stage where we thought to ourselves that we’d succeeded so far and got to
a certain level and we had to make a decision. We couldn’t really turn
back, though. The biggest worry was whether the computer craze would die out
overnight. Quite clearly, that isn’t going to be the
case.”

Costa Panayi’s games have been the backbone of Vortex’s success,
although other releases like Alien Highway have involved other
programmers heavily... Obviously, a company such as Vortex gets sent quite a
few programs for evaluation. Have they never been tempted to start a budget
label, for instance? Luke explains: “I suppose we
could easily have started another label on the budget side, but it’s not
the sort of thing we want to do. How can you one day be sat down working out
something really complicated and new, and two hours later try and promote a
game that sells for £1.99? Your heart’s not in it. Maybe some people
can work that way, but I don’t think we could...”

Working as a design engineer, Costa was involved in 3D geometry on a daily
basis, so when it came to programming games it’s not too surprising that
3D techniques came quite naturally to the fore. “I’m quite fascinated with 3D — I’ve always
liked to have things neatly arranged and geometrically correct, and I suppose
my engineering background all tied in with programming.”

Costa first took the plunge into 3D with Android II and since then
all his games have been in 3D. “It just seems like a step backwards to
return to 2D now — I find you get a feeling of space when you’re working in 3D,
and I don’t think I could write in 2D. It would be easy enough to do, but I
wouldn’t want to.”

With a string of successful games behind him (the lowest overall rating
Costa collected was 79%), he’s invested a fair bit of time, effort and
expertise into developing 3D techniques on the Spectrum. But it’s not just a
question of keeping routines and adding to them — Highway Encounter
meant starting from scratch again, and Revolution is another
fundamentally different style of display and programming. “I like to take a
completely different approach to the way I handle the 3D in each game,”
Costa explains, “It would be nice to come up with some sort of new system
which gets out of the mould. We did it with Highway, and then we decided
that we had to come up with something different, totally away from the shoot em
up type game. After Revolution, it would be nice to do something
completely different again. It’s as much a matter of looking at the game types
and the way games play as actually looking at the environment — you can keep
producing 3D games, the same games with a different scenario, but the
difficulty is in coming up with something different.”

Revolution was designed with lastability in mind, so far as the
gameplay was concerned. Each time a new game starts, the puzzles are shifted
around between levels and their locations on individual levels are also changed
randomly. “Shuffling the puzzles round and creating a new landscape, or set
of levels, each time you start to play — it’s trying to make the game something
more than other games on the market,” Luke says, “even with our old
games, you always had the first level, second level, third level and so on, and
you knew what was coming. Alien Highway, the remix of Highway
Encounter started us thinking that way, and with Revolution I think
the changes in the puzzles and landscape are the main attraction. If someone
picks up the game and can’t get past the first level, then the game can be
played on level one and the player still gets thirty new puzzles — so you can
still enjoy it, even if you never get past the first level!”

Vortex appear every six months or so — two games a year is about all Costa
can handle on his own. They take a different approach to designing games too:
there’s never a storyboard to work from: “Well, I come out with ideas — as
does everybody,” Costa explains, “and we throw them about and we always
seem to reach a point where we say ‘that’s a good idea, why don’t we go ahead
and see what that brings forward?’. Ideas that we find in the meantime are
thrown in as well.”

“It’s a process of continual design rather than continual
refinement,” Luke adds, “For instance we might decide to do something
that has two animation stages in it, and Costa goes away and works for about
two weeks on it and comes back with five stages of animation. We say to him ‘I
thought you said it could only be two stages’ and he’ll say ‘yes, well it’s
different, there’s five now!’”

“With Revolution we thought there are no bouncing ball games, so
why don’t we have a go? And suddenly all these ball games started appearing!
They all tend to be rolling rather than bouncing, so there’s a difference,”
Costa adds, “The same thing happened with Cyclone — it seemed a
natural progression from TLL and then there were dozens of helicopter games on
the market suddenly...”

Things are moving for Vortex. They’ve just signed a deal with US Gold, who
will be taking care of the marketing side of things for them in future, and
they plan to expand: “Now that the market’s moved on to Europe, and we’ve
moved on, Vortex has outgrown the Vortex team and with this deal, some of the
pressure is taken off us. We can really concentrate on producing the software,
and the aim is to build a team around Cos to keep producing the same standard
of games. We have our own standards, and intend to stick to them. We’re looking
for talented programmers up in Manchester, so if anyone would like to get in
touch...”

Obviously, with a six month lead time on a Costa Panayi game, there’s
unlikely to be another release in time for Christmas. But with the plans for
taking on extra hands, who knows? Luke and Costa left for Manchester smiling
enigmatically. They may have something in the pipeline for the festive season
after all...